Fig. 3: Producer to consumer dynamics is affected by species richness for most metabolites.

a Significant differences between the slopes of the species richness vs producers or consumers correlations were observed for the majority of metabolites, with producers having a steeper slope in 24% of the metabolites, and consumers having a steeper slope in 55% of the metabolites analysed. b–p Representation of the correlation between species diversity vs producers or consumers for the top 15 metabolites with the highest MESs in healthy microbiomes. Analyses included all samples from our dataset (n = 1661, including healthy and diseased cohorts), and only metabolites exchanged within at least 50 microbiomes. Each subplot contains two points for each sample to represent the diversity of producers (brown circles) and consumers (blue triangles). Asterisks indicate a significant p value of the t-test associated with the linear regression model (two-sided) after Bonferroni correction (i.e., p < 0.00011).